it’s definitely progressed a lot since 2008, but the last couple of years have been extremely slow

FDO stands for FreeDesktop.Org, the committee responsible for various desktop Linux standards including icon themes. So FDO icons just refers to your system icon theme, which LibreOffice doesn’t use.

LibreOffice uses its own widget toolkit. It works similarly to wxWidgets, basically just maps to whatever toolkit is native on the current platform. It uses Win32 on Windows, Cocoa on macOS, Qt on KDE, GTK on GNOME and a few others.

That said, their current approach to dark themes is pretty bad. It can very easily conflict with the dark theme from the host toolkit and cause issues if misconfigured, which has caused a lot of people to think it just doesn’t work. It does work, but it can be confusing as hell to configure correctly.

For instance, LibreOffice has a setting you can use to change the application colors. It barely works and you should never touch it. Just let it get the colors from your toolkit.

There’s also the fact that LibreOffice doesn’t use FDO icons and has its own icon setting which doesn’t automatically follow dark/light theme. If you’re using a dark theme, you have to manually switch the icon set to one that isn’t impossible to see on a dark background.

Oh and if you want your documents to use a dark palette that’s also a separate setting. Like I said, confusing.

It used to be open source, but large parts of it have been relicensed under their proprietary source-available shared source license. The reason why it isn’t entirely proprietary is that it’s based on Firefox, which is entirely licensed under the MPL. The weak copyleft of the MPL states that all parts lifted from Firefox must remain open source, but the new parts can be proprietary.

Source-available licenses are a type of proprietary license where the code is made public for people to look at, but you’re not actually allowed to use it. Users can still contribute upstream, so they’re usually parasitic licenses aimed at getting free labour out of the userbase without actually giving back any code to the commons, all while keeping up the illusion of being open source. It sucks.

The job of the window manager is to manage windows and very little else. Font rendering is done by the widget toolkit, usually via freetype/harfbuzz.

Because it’s not actually a good idea.

You create text that is basically impossible to search. Like, for instance, do a Ctrl+F on this page and search for “Bold”. You’ll see the example from OP doesn’t get picked up, because it’s not a B, it’s a 𝗕. And it’s not an o, it’s an 𝗼. And so on. Or how about this? Go on Google and copy-paste this word from OP: “s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵”. Now, stroke isn’t a particularly unusual word, but this thread is just about the only result Google returns. Because it’s not stroke. It’s s̵t̵r̵o̵k̵e̵.

It’s also bad for accessibility. A lot of the time screen readers just won’t know what to do with your bold or italic Unicode text.

And of course this only works for characters for which Unicode actually has these variants. Not a problem with the Latin alphabet, but what about Arabic? Cyrillic? Chinese? Devanagari? Hangul? Not gonna work.

These characters are from the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols code block. They’re stylized Greek and Latin letters meant chiefly for use in mathematical contexts. The Unicode standard explicitly advises against using them to fake markup for the reasons outlined above and more. A simple markup language is just about always going to be preferable to faking it with Unicode.

Source? Last I checked, the Steam Deck was very much in the minority even when narrowed down to just desktop Linux.

Yeah. xwayland isn’t gonna die ever probably, so there’s no rush.

It is significantly less powerful when compared to LibreOffice, lacking support for many features. It offers less applications than LibreOffice. It is significantly less customizable than LibreOffice. It’s built on bloated web tech. It lacks RTL support.

I am not paranoid about OnlyOffice’s origin. I also do not think it is the best office suite on Linux by a mile.

FileZilla.

Is there any reason you need to switch other than the age of the last releases? Avidemux had its last release in 2022 and its last commit a week ago. For a piece of software with a fairly stable and unchanging set of features, that seems pretty reasonable to me. Avidemux still works fine on Linux and is still packaged by all of the large Linux distros, so I don’t see the problem. VirtualDub’s definitely dead, though.

IIRC the Krita people were working on redoing the text tool. Not sure if/when it’s going to be finished, though.

Holy shit, will people ever shut up about the name? The truth is that barely anyone actually gives a shit except FOSS zealots trying to come up with excuses for why GIMP wasn’t successful (or those belonging to the anti-GIMP circlejerk that’s surfaced as of late trying to come up with new nonsensical reasons to hate a random piece of FOSS). Outside of the English-speaking world, the amount of people who give a shit about GIMP’s name is precisely zero and the word gimp is almost exclusively associated with the program. Even inside of the English-speaking world, I see GIMP used to refer to the program more often than for anything else. The amount of people actually who actually care about the name is negligible and the amount of brand recognition that would be lost from a rename would significantly outweigh the benefits of possibly having a couple more schools think about maybe starting to use GIMP.

And the truth is that as far as FOSS GUI programs are concerned, GIMP has been tremendously successful. It’s easily among the most popular, alongside Blender, Firefox and LibreOffice. It is and always has been far more popular than Krita in both professional and non-professional contexts. I’ve seen it installed on the computers of both my secondary school and college, because it turns out school computer labs need image editors and they’re not going to pay for Photoshop licenses.

But it hasn’t been more successful than Photoshop. And Firefox hasn’t been more successful than Chrome. And LibreOffice hasn’t been more successful than MS Office. And Blender hasn’t been more successful than Maya. And Godot hasn’t been more successful than Unity. And I could go on. Because no single FOSS GUI program has achieved industry standard status. Though Blender has a pretty good shot at making it.

Why would Adobe do literally anything about CS6 in the year 2024 when they discontinued in 2013?

Nah, a ton of Linux fans seem to shill hard for Apple for some reason.

Oh boy, Davinci? Don’t hold your breath, it’s super picky even with the more mature GPU drivers.

Content blockers like uBlock use filter lists which list every single element that needs to be blocked across the entire web. I currently have nearly 700000 of these filters active. That is very far outside the scope of a simple script. Basically all ad blocking userscripts are site-specific and they still usually block significantly less than uBlock would on the same site. Also, userscripts are not safer than extensions.

Most AUR packages that aren’t postfixed with “-bin” are compiled on your system. Most distro packages have AUR counterparts, but they’re usually git builds, so using them for every package you can will probably just break your system.

It’s not an unpopular opinion that Apple is the only one that does sleep right. It is an unpopular opinion that this is only possible because they have a complete walled garden and that open platforms are fucked, especially considering it is easy and common to install applications from outside the App Store on macOS. We used to have sleep figured out, that’s what S3 was. But then hardware vendors dropped it. So yes, drivers and hardware vendors are part of the problem. The Steam Deck is an example of an open platform where sleep works fine.

I wonder. The Steam Deck holds charge very well, but then another comment here says “Nothing with with a recent AMD gfx Card or APU will officially support S3”. Perhaps the Steam Deck uses hibernate? It launches pretty fast, but then maybe storing memory to the built-in SSD is fast enough. Or perhaps even if not officially supported the S3 in the Steam Deck’s APU still works well enough. Or perhaps the APU is older than I think it is.